1. Why do the dark days of winter, when stems are black and leaves have fallen, refresh my hopes for gardening?
2. Why in summer, when the garden is full and green and ceaselessly growing, do my hopes dim?
3. What is it in December, while the sweet olive blooms, that makes the Gulf air feel so strangely soft and sends a shiver down my spine?
4. What does the green chameleon see when I clasp him in my hand, his thin skin beating on the slender scrollwork of his bones?
5. What virtue of poverty entices the richest concentration of wildflowers to assemble on the poorest soils, as they do at Splinter Hill and other Gulf Coast bogs?
6. Why do the June bugs, year after year, strip my healthiest persimmon bare, but never taste the struggling persimmon 20 yards away?
7. What kind of paradise must I endure without the suck and stink of Delta muck, without the scratch of blackberry claws, without the poison of the moccasin?
8. In the world without deceit we all desire, what happens to the sapphire blue of butterflies? Do the red and ivory leaves of pitcher plants — cathedral glass to dazzle insects they digest — become as bland and green as grass?
9. In a universe entwined in circles, where nebulas spiral nebulas, globes circle globes, and pea vines twist toward the arcing sun, their looping tendrils lashed to all they touch, why must I plant my mustards in such straight rows?
10. At this nativity, where is the bear? The ten thousand ibis flocked in a cypress swamp, cane thickets wound with jessamine? Where are the beetles and the dragonflies, the ants and the mosquitoes, the distant odor of the wind in pines, the alligator roar? Where are the mandarins and muscadines, the yaupon and green briar?
11. Why not here?
12. Why not now?